
Have you met Suzette, administrative assistant in the Department of Physics? Spend the next 2 minutes getting to know her a little better.
Where is your favorite place on campus?
There’s a little path between Cameron Library and Triffo Hall. It has a garden on one side, and planters, and it’s just really delightful. Because it’s Canada 150, someone decided to do a planter with red and white flowers, and pinwheels. That’s my favourite spot.

Tablet or paper?
Half and half. A tablet is great for organizing my day, and taking notes at meetings. But if I’m taking notes at a movie or a play, that has to be on paper (I’m one of the editors of a website about comics called Sequential Tart).
Name one thing you’ve brought to work from home.
Shoes. More than one pair. Let’s leave it at that.
What is the one thing you can’t live without?
Other than coffee? My phone.
If you won airfare to anywhere in the world, where would you go?
New Zealand. I’d visit friends and all the Lord of the Rings filming locations. Then I’d hop over to the Antarctic to say hi to our researchers at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and maybe meet some penguins.
You can invite anyone — alive or dead, real or fictional — to dinner. Who would it be?
Mary Shelley. I’m personally interested in a lot of things that she helped put into motion — gothic literature, monster literature…
I would love to tour her around CCIS, too. Frankenstein was inspired by a lecture she went to about electricity. I would love to get her take on what’s happening in STEM fields here.
If you could switch jobs with someone else on campus for a week, what would you do?
In the summer, it would be neat to be tending the gardens. I’m a terrible gardener, though — I just really admire their handiwork. They do a great job.
What does “uplifting the whole people” mean to you?
It means that we train and equip people to solve problems — not just for themselves, and not just for their particular area of research, but for the community.
If you could solve any problem in the world, what would it be?
Inequality. We’re seeing a lot of money, resources, even education being concentrated into the hands of a small number of people. That’s terrible for a democracy. I think we’d benefit if we were able to get more people onside with sharing what we have.
What 3 words best describe your U of A experience?
Fun. Stimulating. And educational — I don’t just mean going to school, but learning from different people who come from different places and disciplines. I find that people are very good about sharing their experience.

Suzette Chan has an administrative role the Department of Physics. She has also gets to write about research on everything from the infinitesimally small subjects of particle physics to astronomical space physics phenomena. As a fan of both real science and comic-book physics, she believes this is the best of all possible worlds.